We received the sad news Saturday morning that Pirates legend Bill Mazeroski passed away at the age of 89.
As far as local athletes go, Maz was it. Local boy from Wheeling, West Virginia, signed with his hometown team and made his MLB debut in 1956. Hit the only Game 7 walkoff home run in World Series to defeat the mighty Yankees at the young age of just 23 years old, played 17 seasons in the Majors all with the Pirates, won eight gold gloves in his career and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2001. He was the standard with defense at second base. Maz was a Pirates player for life and never played elsewhere. He had the ultimate storybook career and life.
I had no interactions with Maz over the years unfortunately, but I always enjoyed seeing him around the team when he was hanging out with the guys at camp in Bradenton. My favorite Maz clip, besides his historic home run of course, was his induction speech in Cooperstown in 2001. It has to be the shortest Hall of Fame speech ever as his emotions took over and he called an audible instead of the 12 pages he had prepared. Here it is if you haven’t seen it before or want to watch again. Trust me, it’s short…just a quick 3 minutes and 28 seconds.
And if you want some more reading on Maz today, I dropped some links below for additional reading.
MLB Trade Rumors gives a nice recap of his career and really dives into the numbers and what he meant to the game especially with his defense.
Adam Berry of MLB.com penned a great piece on Maz with quotes from Maz and from around the league.
More Maz articles can be found here at The Athletic link and ESPN link. And I’ll end with some tweets of folks remembering Maz today:
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